The only book to provide the full standards-based history of SMS, from
concept through standardisation to market takeup, written by the main Chairmen
of the standards groups: Friedhelm Hillebrand (centre), Finn Trosby
(right) and Kevin Holley (left), together with Ian Harris (not pictured, sadly
deceased in June 2010).

Welcome To

A brief history of my involvement in SMS ... my first meeting was in June
1988, where I invented the concept of using a time zone in the SMS header.
Since then I played a key part in getting the most out of the available single
SCCP message bandwidth, implemented the compression of characters to obtain 160
characters from 140 bytes, invented the SMS TP User Data header, including the
use of the <CR> character to erase a control sequence at the beginning of
a line (<CR> traditionally sends the display to the beginning of the
current line and starts erasing everything there). On 28th January 2008 I
extended this concept to allow switching of languages in new phones to enable
different characters to be displayed. This was started specifically for
the Turkish language. The concept is that
<language><ESC><CR> is sent at the beginning of a
message. On older phones the CR will go back to the beginning of the line
and overwrite this sequence, i.e. it is invisible to older phones. On
newer phones the phone will switch to the extended character page for
<language> to allow additional characters to be displayed with
<ESC><character> which are shown in older phones as a similar
character. On the 5th February 2008 I extended this concept to allow
switching between languages mid-message using
<language><ESC><SPACE>. This latter technique needs to
be used to avoid that on older phones part of the text is overwritten. It
does have the downside that the older phones display a single space character
when the language is switched mid-message. Phones can intelligently
process the input text and use the <ESC><SPACE> instead of a space
between words when language switching is required.

I used to have this website on Demon Internet at Parsley. The pages from
there are available on this site, but are no longer being
maintained. As I get time, I will be updating this site to
provide new information and newer versions of software. To go to
the old pages click below.